After Whitewashing, presented last season at Comédie de Genève, director, writer and performer Rébecca Chaillon returns with a new creation shaped as a fable, approaching fiction and storytelling as powerful tools that minoritised people can seize in order to overcome humiliation, fear and forced marginalisation. Inspired both by the place where she lives and works—Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest département in France, located on the immediate outskirts of the capital—and by her travels to Martinique and New Orleans, La Parabole du Seum draws upon the inventiveness of outcasts and their capacity to create their own mythologies and rituals in order to survive the violence and coercion of normative systems.

With this “astrological and astronomical tale”, whose title playfully refers to Parable of the Sower, the landmark twentieth-century science-fiction novel by Black American author Octavia E. Butler, Rébecca Chaillon transforms the stage into a utopian space where new myths and rituals can emerge, where communities ostracised and discriminated against for being Black, overweight, lesbian or trans can gather together and once again imagine the possibility of a future.